I set out at a young age to be a naturalist. I grew up out in
the back country on the Isle of Pines, Cuba and spent my free time there
trekking into the wilds to collect native orchids. I was the youngest member
of the Cuban Orchid Society and by the age of 13 was credited with the discovery
of a new species - Oncidium intermedium. I took it up to Havana myself to
deliver it to the famous Richard Evans Schultes who was down from Harvard
University. And so I figured I knew what I was doing a year or two after
the Cuban revolution when exiled in Miami, Florida I got my first chance
to go back out into the wilds.

I was at Southwest Miami High. An acquaintance had a car and was interested
in wild orchids. I assured him I could find him orchids if he would just
take me out into the Everglades. After all, in my mind I was an expert and
knew everything there was to know about finding orchids in the wilds. I
became a kind of Daniel Boone when I hit the woods. I was in my element.
My acquaintance, in contrast, was a city boy. When we finally parked the
car off the Loop Road that in those days cut down off the bend in the Tamiami
Trail at a point deep in the wilderness, it was humorous to see how hesitantly
he stepped off the dirt road into the vegetation. As for myself, I just
burst into foliage and left my befuddled companion far behind.

Although I was wearing tennis shoes - a big "no-no" when you're
in snake country - I lit out at a full run behind a huge black snake I spotted.
After all, I was carrying my Cuban machete with me. I figured I could handle
myself. I couldn't keep up with the snake, though. It slithered faster than
I could run. In the end I gave up and set off looking for orchids again.
I'd never been in a cypress head before and so was fascinated. I was traveling
fast and I was traveling alone. My companion still hadn't caught up with
me. That's when I spotted the orchids.

I had come to the edge of a clearing, maybe some thirty or forty feet
across. On the opposite side was an old rotten tree festooned with epiphytic
orchids. Filled with pride that I hadn't lost my touch, I yelled out to
my companion, "Orchids. Millions of orchids!" and lit out blindly
across that clearing, never taking my eyes off the orchids. I was half-way
across the clearing when an alarm went off in my mind. "Snake!"

I was standing with one leg in the air, about to step over a log directly
in my path. The only thing I can figure is that I had always known two things
about snakes: (1) never wear tennis shoes into snake country because most
fatal snake bites occur below the ankle, and (2) never step over a log,
as there may be a snake curled up on the other side of it. Hurriedly, I
cast a cursory glance down at the log to make sure it was safe. Lying on
the other side of the log, right where I was about to put my foot, was a
venomous snake with the big triangular head of a pit viper.

I froze there, poised on one foot, beginning to lose my balance. The
ground was muddy and wet, slippery. I went to step back but in horror yanked
my foot back up in the air. There was an identical snake right behind me.
I lost my balance and, so as not to topple over, leapt up onto the log.
It was a short little log and began to wobble back and forth in the mud.
A third snake crawled out from the log. When I looked down in horror at
it, I saw there was a forth one next to it. And a fifth! And a sixth! The
entire open area between me and the orchids, I now saw, as I actually looked
at the ground for the first time, was covered with deadly water moccasins.

It was not a clearing at all I had rushed so blindly into, but a dried
up pond - probably the last one in this whole region to go dry just before
the onset of the rainy season. All the snakes from the swamp miles and miles
around had become concentrated here. They lay criss-crossed everywhichway,
tangled over one another, eating the shiny silver minnows that covered the
mud. This was their last feast of the season. By then, I was waving my arms
to keep my balance on the log that kept spinning one way then the other
in the mushy mud.

I managed to turn around on the log with a mind to get back out of there,
only to find the snakes were just as thick in the direction I had come from.
The sight of so many water moccasins, with their big triangular heads made
me queasy. At that point my friend appeared at the edge of the dried-up
pond. He just stood there staring. His jaw dropped.

I wasn't the intrepid explorer from Cuba anymore. I was a terrified teenager
in tennis shoes trying like a lumberjack to keep his balance on a slippery
log right plumb in the middle of several hundred deadly Cottonmouths. Then,
that boy vanished and something that had more sense than he did carefully
stepped off the log and right into the middle of the nearest footprint in
the mud.
It was only then, as I stepped carefully and slowly back, retracing my exact
steps through the snakes, that I noticed how caught up they were in eating
their minnows. They really weren't too interested in me. Had I stepped on
one in my mad and blind rush for the orchids, I would surely have been dead.
But I could see now, tiptoeing my way cautiously back through the snakes,
that my footsteps had fallen exactly in those rare open spots of mud between
the snakes. There were so many snakes and they were so thick that they criss-crossed
over each other. And yet, without even looking down -- my eyes had been
fixed on the orchids the whole time -- I hadn't stepped on a single snake.

By the time I got to where my companion was waiting safely at the edge
of the dried-up pond, I was badly shaken up and had no more taste for exploration
that day. I just headed slowly and cautiously back for the road, without
any orchids. I gave little thought to the events of that day until a great
many years later.

I was much older and completing a Ph.D. in biology at Columbia University
when I realized I didn't want to be a scientist. Surrounded by biophysicists,
biochemists and the like, I knew quite a bit about phytochrome physiology,
especially as it related to cyclic photophosphorylation and anthocyanin
synthesis - but it had begun to dawn on me: none of this had the least bit
to do with who I was, what I was about. I had begun reading novels that
dealt with human nature, in the deepest sense of that word. I realized it
was this I was interested in exploring, more than biology, more than the
wilderness. I felt it to be, at least in my case, in more immediate need
of healing. How suddenly I then saw the obvious: the only way to heal nature
on the outside is to heal our own inner nature. It's our disturbed heart
- our wrong values - that's wrecked the integrity of every single ecosystem
on earth. I got my Ph.D. degree but a few years later gave up my profession
as a biology professor and took a weekend job waiting on tables at an Italian
restaurant. I set out to become a novelist. The years went by, though, and
the "big novel" never materialized. I lost the waiter job. I lost
the woman I loved. I was destitute. I still saw no evidence I had any talent
for writing. Once again, I had rushed headlong forward and gotten myself
into a predicament of danger. It was then I remembered the episode of the
snakes.
It occurred to me for the first time how utterly impossible it would have
been, statistically, to walk blindly through so many snakes without stepping
on a single one. It couldn't have been coincidence. Something had to have
been guiding my steps that day in the swamp until it could get my notice
and get me safely back out of there. That something -- call it what you
will -- how can we know what it is? -- was still leading me on. This is
what I realized.

It dawned on me that where my life was going probably had as little to
do with novels as it did with orchids. My life, I began to see, had everything
to do with that which was deepest in my own nature and which saw what I
didn't and knew what I couldn't. It was that I had found my first intimations
of, in the Big Cypress Swamp so many decades ago - not orchids. And it was
that I was finding my way closer to by turning away from science towards
art, away from the mind towards the heart - not novels.

To walk its path as my own is my goal now and, to the extent I have been
able to accomplish this on a day by day basis over the years, my life has
become richer by far than I ever could have imagined - woman or no woman;
money or no money; success or no success.

What I have found is so much more beautiful and powerful than anything
that profession or position has to offer. To the extent I enter into contact
with that incorruptible core within, I have more by far to give the human
world than that world could ever possibly have to give me.

If we can only turn around in time and come in whatever way possible, as
individuals or collectively, somehow closer to what is deepest and truest
in our nature, we can leave our children a healthier planet than the one
left to us. This is what it means now - at least to me - to be a naturalist.
We have to start with ourselves.